These Silent Streets

Returning to a place you once lived holds a feeling that is most bittersweet. The familiarity, the routine, the people that still reside there. You know the streets. You know the fastest way to a best friend's house that you had in school, the alleyway in which you’d play cowboy shootouts and trade game cards like a serious undercover operation. Remembering where that first love you held hands with on the park bench under that ageing oak tree - pondering on where they could possibly be now. Like a poetic tribute to romantic old silent films, an attentive eagle-eyed series follows Leonard around his old quarters. He owns this town and the hollow streets, and these walls are still always watching.

Once, an unhappy love affair. The comfort of familiarity clouded by the toxic perception of the harshness of confinement - a reminder of a time when he wondered if this was where he wanted to be. Photographer Kari Jaroszynska shadows Leonard around his old playground, a town painted with ghostly memories that act out before his eyes. The people aren’t here any more, and neither is the boy that is playing by his name.

Now, it is no longer a place in which he is itching to escape from. It’s no longer a town that holds nothing other than a predetermined path. No. Now it has become its own getaway. A place that holds a liberation from the concrete cities that once seemed so full of promise, where the harshness became too overbearing and destructive. He can tackle those battles knowing this place of solace resides behind him. Stomping through this once detaining space with a new lease of reckless abandonment and appreciation, it is now home again.